"During a gold rush, sell shovels" - What are some other examples of this?
"During a gold rush, sell shovels" - What are some other examples of this?
A couple of others I can think of:
- Crypto-boom of 2016ish: GPUs/mining rigs
- LLM/AI hype nowish: User generated data
- 90's dotcom bubble: Server space
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During a pandemic, sell sanitizer and toilet paper?
But most those guys were pretty much seen as assholes, so I don't know if this good advice or not.
Why assholes? Because the toilet paper?
Assholes are only that if they price gauge during people's time of need.
Yeah, over here we have this former rich guy (he lost his fortune thinking he was better at picking stocks than he actually was.) He got lucky and made his fortune as an early investor in a cell phone company in 2000s, and after that he's basically become a serial grifter. His covid enterprise was to buy face masks in bulk, repackage them, and resell.
Well, he got hit with a huge fine: The face masks were only approved as long as they remained in their original packaging. Once he repackaged them, they were no longer considered sterile, and as such no longer approved for medical use => false advertising
What a collosal moron
The toilet paper thing was mostly a result of mass hysteria, not an actual issue of supply and demand. There were some supply issues in Australia IIRC, but most countries would absolutely not have had any toilet paper shortages if people hadn't all panic-bought far more than they needed
I wonder if all of the ones hoarding toilet paper have managed to use up their stash yet.
Nope. Still good for a few years.
But that's because I always buy toilet paper and paper towels at Costco, and buy more when I'm down to two cases.
Two is one, one is none.
I don't know about that, but I do know I grabbed basically a lifetime supply of hand sanitizer a year or so ago because the grocery store was so overstocked they were giving them away for free, LOL.
Yup! One in my town was passing out free wipes for over a year.
No, hand made masks. Especially when it surprises the officials who should have known it was possible and beefed up supplies of the real thing. The first few months of Covid were a wild ride on knowing what would be the best choices of DIY protection, and Etsy and other sites were crazy.
I 3D printed a few dozen of these visor things for my local hospital that took 3 ring binder dividers as face shields/sneeze guards. Several ended up multi-colored because I used the ends of several spools of filament for that.
I've still got about 100 or so of them. I was mass printing them as part of a coordinated project. We basically managed to saturate the local area with them. Once demand suddenly stopped, I was left with the next batch ready to go. I've still to find a good use for them.